Nature of the Natural Woman

Hans Baldung Grien used the innovative chiaroscuro woodcut technique, invented in Germany in 1508, to create his prints Witches' Sabbath (1510) and Fall of Man (1511). This thesis argues that Baldung's depictions of witches and of Eve are connected by the chiaroscuro woodcut technique. The chiaroscuro print establishes a conceptual genealogy that begins with Eve as humanity's first female transgressor and results in the sixteenth-century witch. The chiaroscuro woodcut technique removes the sixteenth-century witch of Witches' Sabbath and Biblical personage Eve in Fall of Man from discrete traditional iconographic lineages and encourages the viewer to understand witches and Eve as natural women. The new category of the natural woman serves as a way to analyze the relationship between early modern witches and Eve, as well as their pictorial and textual connections to the Christian hermit and the folkloric wild woman. Furthermore, the chiaroscuro technique elevated the woodcut by making it a luxurious, fine-art print, and thus allowed Baldung to depict his female subjects independent of any explicit textual or visual precedents. Indeed, Baldung used the technique to introduce a darkness, mood, and drama that was impossible to capture with other techniques in the graphic arts.